Matt Groening

Matthew Abram Groening, born February 15, 1954, in Portland, Oregon, is an American cartoonist and animator whose work helped define adult animated comedy from the late 1970s into the 21st century. He is best known as the creator of The Simpsons, which began in 1989 and became the longest-running American primetime television series, as well as the longest-running American animated series and sitcom. He also created the comic strip Life in Hell, and later the television series Futurama and Disenchantment.

Groening grew up in a large family as the middle of five children. His mother, Margaret Ruth Wiggum, was once a teacher, and his father, Homer Philip Groening, was a filmmaker, advertiser, writer, and cartoonist. His family background included Norwegian American and Canadian Mennonite roots, and his grandfather Abram A. Groening taught at Tabor College before moving to Oregon. In Portland, Groening attended Ainsworth Elementary School and Lincoln High School, then went on to The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, a liberal arts school he described as “a hippie college, with no grades or required classes, that drew every weirdo in the Northwest.”

At Evergreen, Groening edited the campus newspaper, The Cooper Point Journal, and wrote articles and drew cartoons for it. He nearly completed a Bachelor of Arts in journalism in 1977, but left before finishing the degree. His taste for cartoons had begun earlier, after watching Disney’s One Hundred and One Dalmatians and Monty Python. He also became friends with fellow cartoonist Lynda Barry, whom he later called “probably [his] biggest inspiration,” after learning she had written a fan letter to Joseph Heller, one of his favorite authors, and received a reply.

In 1977, at age 23, Groening moved to Los Angeles to become a writer. He worked a string of jobs, including extra work in a television film, busing tables, washing dishes at a nursing home, clerking at the Hollywood Licorice Pizza record store, working in a sewage treatment plant, and chauffeuring and ghostwriting for a retired director of Western films. Out of this period came Life in Hell, a self-published comic book he used to describe Los Angeles life to friends. He distributed it at Licorice Pizza, and in 1978 made his first professional cartoon sale to the avant-garde magazine Wet.

Life in Hell made its official debut as a comic strip in the Los Angeles Reader on April 25, 1980, after editor James Vowell saw Groening’s cartoons. The strip grew quickly, leading to books such as Love Is Hell, Work Is Hell, School Is Hell, Childhood Is Hell, The Big Book of Hell, and The Huge Book of Hell. At its peak, it appeared in 250 weekly newspapers. In 1985, producer James L. Brooks contacted Groening about adapting it for animated sequences on The Tracey Ullman Show. Worried about losing ownership rights, Groening created a new family instead: the Simpsons.

From that decision came The Simpsons, followed by Futurama, created with former Simpsons writer David X. Cohen and first broadcast in 1999, and Disenchantment, developed for Netflix and premiered in 2018. Groening has won 14 Primetime Emmy Awards, 12 for The Simpsons and 2 for Futurama, as well as a British Comedy Award for “outstanding contribution to comedy” in 2004, the National Cartoonist Society Reuben Award in 2002, and a Hollywood Walk of Fame star in 2012. His lines still matter because they began close to the ground: enthusiasms, obsessions, pet peeves, problems, and the odd comedy of ordinary life.